


a man from a half-remembered dream

by aproposity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Inception (2010), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:05:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aproposity/pseuds/aproposity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by <a href="http://whitelaws.tumblr.com/post/23939965531">this</a>. Steve Rogers and Tony Stark have never worked well together on a job, but this one is about to get far more complicated than either of them imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a man from a half-remembered dream

“Get down!”

Steve has barely opened his eyes before the ripple of gunfire flashes across his vision, but old habits die hard – military training even harder – and he only has to register the startled body lurching up from beside him for that training to kick in with a vengeance. He will never remember rugby-tackling Anthony Stark into an ammunitions cache. He is only dimly aware of snow and hands whipping at his face one moment and staring down into his chief architect’s endlessly smug grin the next.

It’s the grin that does it.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?!” Steve yells into Stark’s face without restraint, barely heard over the blizzard. The reflexive awareness of a civilian in danger clings to him like a desperate lover and he drags the other man to his knees by the crumpled lapels of his obscenely expensive suit, shaking him all the while.

Predictably, Stark remains completely unaffected, batting Steve’s hands away with an irritation that stretches only to his colleague and not a whit to his own damn carelessness.

“S’what I do best, right?” he throws back, that grin still fixed to his face as he hunkers down against their sorry excuse for shelter and busies himself with pulling the creases out of his unreal suit.

The taut silence between them drives Stark to look up not two minutes later, indignance written plain across his face. “Hey, don’t get your panties in a bunch. This is not the train I ordered, and the Hawk never mentioned anything about security. So don’t you be laying this at my door. He’s the one with the eyes, not me.”

 _Train…_ “Wait.”

Steve glances up in time to witness a solitary figure advancing out of the wreckage littered across what is, despite looking half-disembowelled and bombed to hell, unmistakeably a train. The standard issue military uniform is striking even through the near-horizontal daggers of snow, though it too is made hellish, torn beyond repair and out of time even in this place.

He ducks down as another round of fire snarls along the metal carriage and rips through the all too flimsy blockade of cargo they’d been lucky enough to end up behind, but just a glimpse is enough. It’s not the time to choke, but the soft _“no”_ he lets slips is almost involuntary.

“No?” Stark is at his shoulder, struggling to see despite the imminent gunfire threatening to blow his head off. Steve brings a hand to his temple, face crumpling in frustration and grief.

“Not security,” he says, and Stark even has the decency to look concerned for once. A heavy hand braces his shoulder.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Steve shrugs him off. “We need to move. Now.”

Steve jostles and shoves Stark through the debris scattered across the train’s floor, finding makeshift cover in scorched luggage and jagged plates of metal left as remnants of the open wounds scattered across its hull. For once Stark isn’t bitching, keeping his head down and moving exactly when Steve tells him to as the rogue soldier bears down on them both, but Steve’s worked with him long enough to know that it won’t last.

They get as far as the safety of the doors to the next carriage when Stark rounds on him, latching onto an arm and forcibly dragging him back to face him. His glare is near-murderous, tinged with a violation only an architect could feel this far in on a job. “It’s him isn’t it? It’s him and this is your warzone, bullying their way into _my_ schematics!”

Steve shrugs him off for the second time and holds his hands up, giving a quick shake of his head in an effort to ward away the glare that continues to bore between his eyes. “Look pal, I didn’t plan this any more than you did –”

“Could’ve fooled me!” Stark all but snarls back.

“Why’d it have to be a train, huh!? A bus, a plane, anything but a damn train!”

“You know why! Trains are safe, they work. You have issues, Steve, you keep ‘em in boxes or in attics. A train’s a train, not emotional fucking baggage.”

Another rattle of gunfire finds Stark throwing himself back down against the door, swearing loudly, and Steve realises too late, as he always does, that it was a mistake to have paired up with him. He needs someone who can take orders – Natasha, Clint, he’d even take Banner – and Stark prides himself on doing anything but.

“Stay here.”

“Like hell.”

“That’s an order.”

“And I told you before. I’m not one of your soldiers.”

For one crazy moment, Steve honestly believes that if there was ever a man who could walk into the path of a one-man army and come out alive through sheer stubbornness alone, it would be Anthony Stark. Unfortunately, it’s the same moment Steve nods in weary assent and steps out into the open, and Stark is right beside him.

Steve recalls the early days, when his subconscious had presented him with the half-formed man before them – torn flesh pulled taut and wrapped around metal and bone. Shade or not, the first time Steve had been genuinely terrified of him, and those first few dreams had him on the verge of fleeing in a rare display of cowardice. The terror had worn off quickly though, to be replaced with a remorse that stuck in his throat like bile.

“That’s more like it,” Bucky Barnes laughs sportingly just as he used to at the gun range or propped up against a bar, slinging the rifle over his shoulder like a toy as he crosses the distance to meet them. “The Steve I know wouldn’t run away from a fight. But then, I guess this is the fight you’ll never stop running from, yeah?”

Bucky is no longer looking at him, his attention firmly fixed on Stark. His hair whips about his face in the gale but it does nothing to hide the way he bears his teeth in something resembling a gleeful smirk. It spreads across a scarred and battle-worn face that barely echoes the handsome youth Bucky had carried like armour before the days of service.

“Wow, kid, you really pushed the boat out for this one, didn’t you?” Bucky looks at Stark the way he used to look at a pretty girl when dropped her off at the end of a date, and Steve really needs to go and see a shrink because he could swear that’s not just a look, that’s a _leer_. “Where’d you get him?”

Of course, Stark’s running his mouth just as Bucky begins to circle him, charged by his typical arrogance and an adolescent petulance at not being spoken to directly, and Steve is too slow to stop him. “Clearly not from the same place he got _you_ , you crazed bas –”

The metal limb collides with lazy boredom, but it is enough to send Stark reeling, his head whipping back. It may be a dream, but the bruise blossoms across Stark’s face regardless.

“Pity about his attitude,” Bucky tuts, shaking his head in disappointment. “Maybe we can fix that.”

Bucky advances the last few feet between them, grabs Stark by the throat and lifts, his weight proving entirely inconsequential as his feet leave the floor. Stark hangs suspended, hands around Bucky’s arm and clawing ineffectually at bionic plates that only scarcely resemble the skeletal structure that Steve remembers.

Steve wills himself to stay put. He doesn’t want to watch Bucky break Stark’s neck, but it proves difficult as the architect’s gasp is stolen away in the blizzard.

“Leave him, Bucky! This is between you and me. He’s a civilian.”

“Civilian…? Look at him. He’s no civilian.” Steve isn’t looking; he can barely blink, eyes trained on Bucky as they are, but Bucky certainly is. His head oscillates to the left, his fingers gradually tightening around Stark’s throat and the metal does not yield against muscle and tendons, cuts into them and bruises them and Stark can no longer breathe.

“He’s one of _your_ lot,” Bucky says as Stark begins to choke, and the look he levels at the architect is one devoid of everything but absent-minded scrutiny. “That makes him collateral damage.”

The job’s lost to them, but it doesn’t do anything to soften the jolt of panic as the train begins to judder on the tracks. Steve already knows what’s happening; he only has to watch as Stark’s eyes fail to open, his hands falling to his sides and his body going slowly limp. The bridge groans, the sound of ancient and unreal stone breaking apart and falling into a sudden abyss. The dream is collapsing, and there is no longer anything in the world they inhabit but the train, roaring its way along to a station that no longer exists.

Bucky knows it too, and his mouth splits into a bloodless smirk that could have been a grimace, if not for the mania. It warps his face, tinges his wide-eyed gaze with feverish madness until the man Steve has painstakingly fought to preserve in the scarred battleground of his mind is distorted almost beyond recognition.

“What’re you fightin’ for, Steve? Come on, tell me. Is it for me?” Bucky’s ever-playful voice drops to a hiss, low and dangerous, and his bionic arm moves seemingly of its own accord, jostling Stark like a rag doll. “Is it for _him_?”

_“Enough!”_

Bucky is strong, far stronger in this world – after all, Steve made him this way – but he doesn’t bank on Steve breaking from the invisible hold he has over him simply by _being_ , and when he barrels into Bucky and jabs a quick right hook at his face he recoils just as he would have when they were boys. Stark slips from his grip easily enough, and the heavy thump when he hits the floor does not sound pleasant but there is nothing Steve can do about that because suddenly Bucky is on him, snarling rage and hatred in his face.

They grapple, scuffling more like children than trained soldiers, but Steve has done this too many times to glean any satisfaction from it. There is a reason why he’s coming out on top despite Bucky’s overpowering strength, and he braces himself even as he takes hold of Bucky by his military jacket and hauls him up.

Stark’s hacking coughs go unnoticed even as the dream stabilizes around them, caught as they are in their stalemate. Bucky’s glare of open disgust melts away to desperation, and Steve cups his face with one hand. He can’t feel the scarred skin or lingering stubble through his gloves, but the strong hinge of his jaw, the jut of his cheekbone, are as present as they ever were, and he tightens his hold around rapidly decaying bone.

“We stopped fighting, Bucky. The war ended, remember?” It isn’t a question, merely a gentle plea, and the howling blizzard careering through the open carriage threatens to carry it away.

“You still believe that?” Bucky murmurs against his palm, and it’s so real Steve feels the shadow of doubt that this is a dream slip down his spine. It can’t be, not with the way cracked, frostbitten lips brush against his wrist and Bucky’s body a strong, soldierly line of subconscious grief against his own. He’s stiff and cold, like a corpse, and the open air not two feet behind him gapes like a waiting maw.

He knew how this would end long before Bucky showed up. No matter what he does, who he brings with him, it always ends up _here._

“You still waitin’ for that train to come in with me on it?” Bucky’s eyes slide closed, his grin tired and broken. The fever that ravages him both inside and out – born from nothing more than Steve’s fading, dying memories – is once more on the cusp of consuming him.

The dream is no longer sliding away from him but shifting nonetheless. Steve can feel it, no matter if he is no more the architect of this realm than Bucky is. It slips through his fingers like sand, like Bucky as he fell the first time.

He does not fight. He does not scream. He presses his face against Bucky’s temple, breathes _“always,”_ and he means it.

“Well. Guess you gotta keep on waiting.” 

When Steve lets him go it is not a relief. He watches Bucky fall and it is the same as it was the first time, the dying scream of his brother-in-arms and plenty more besides ringing in his ears. The one remaining arm made of flesh and blood and bone extends out towards him even as he falls away, and Steve is almost ready to jump with him.

He doesn’t. Experience has taught him that jumping means nothing when you only wake up.

“Thanks,” Stark mutters somewhere behind him, but he isn’t looking at Steve. He isn’t looking at anything, not at his battered suit nor at the dream as it changes around them, the train no longer a howling relic of war and the bridge no longer stretching over an endless chasm. This new train is an express line, a private number right out of the 21st Century, reeking of sickly perfumes and obscene luxury in true Stark fashion, and overlooks a picturesque landscape right off the cover of a Christmas card. All windows and doors accounted for and closed, if you please.

Steve has no clue where the hell the mark is. He’s willing to bet Stark doesn’t either.

An awkward silence that hangs between them, almost stifling with nothing but the soft hum of central heating and silent engines. It’s in this silence that Steve resolves not to tell this billionaire playing at being an architect a damn thing about Bucky, and busies himself with shunting the carriage door open.

The cold is brisk but not biting, and the blizzard seems like an entire level away. He looks left, then right, and retreats only to drag Stark to his feet. “Tell me you've got a quick exit.”

And there’s the conflicted glance. It confirms to Steve what he is already all too aware of – that even after all this time, Stark still doesn’t trust him as far as he could throw him, not on a job where the rabbit warren complexity of his architecture could prove meaningless if Bucky Barnes is there at every corridor with a rifle levelled at their heads.

It passes soon enough, though, and Stark raises his head to look at him, face set and free of all doubt. The guy always was a little crazy. “Mine-shaft, quarter of a mile.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

A quarter of a mile along the line they take the leap together, the rush of air buffeting them as they pass through empty space, gravity pulling them down and simultaneously up until they surface in the bowels of SHIELD headquarters as they left it, Nick Fury’s one-eyed glare fixed impossibly on them both at the same time.

**Author's Note:**

> Please be sure to check out my [Tumblr](http://gildedwithgrace.tumblr.com/) if you enjoyed this fic. Thank you for reading!


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